You see that coconut tree?” said Daniel Krakue, gesturing out beyond the windshield. “That used to be a village.”

It wasn’t hard to see the tree. Apart from a skinny papaya trunk, it was the only thing rising from the surrounding sea of green. We were in Sinoe County, in southwestern Liberia, on a plantation run by a company called Golden Veroleum (GVL), and for miles around there was nothing growing but baby palms, whose lime-colored fronds stretched out about as wide, some three feet or so, as they did high.

Earlier we’d driven through large expanses freshly cleared of their native vegetation, weird deserts of orange mud interrupted only by the corrugated wakes of the ubiquitous giant yellow earthmovers. The company has been in operation in Liberia only since 2009. And the 543,000-acre lease it signed with the government runs for 65 years, with an option for a 33-year extension, so GVL is just getting started.

Krakue is an environmental advocate who has worked with the Sustainable Development Initiative (SDI), a local partner of Friends of the Earth, and he had accompanied me here from Monrovia, the nation’s capital, on a road so riven with ditches, potholes, and impromptu lakes that it took us eight hours to go 150 miles. Sinoe County is home to some 104,000 people, but its isolation and its history as a center of the civil wars that wracked this tiny West African nation from 1989 to 2003 have left it with the ambience of a place that’s been forgotten.

We pulled over in a village called Pluoh, a scattering of mud-and-thatch houses, where a sign staked in the ground read Malaria Spoils Belly. Aside from a few chickens scratching around and a preschooler in a raggedy party dress vigorously cranking a water pump, there wasn’t a whole lot going on.

Little clusters of people sat on crude wooden benches propped beneath the thatch eaves of their huts, and the cries of babies floated on the still morning air. Krakue introduced me to Benedict Menewah, a scrawny 45-year-old father of seven, who filled me in on the story of the lone coconut tree.

He described how GVL had shown up with its Caterpillars in the village he’d grown up in and where his father, Smart Williams, still lived. Hearing the sound of machinery, Williams, a 77-year-old with stooped shoulders and clouded blue eyes, had gone to see what was up. Representatives from GVL, a Liberian company whose anchor investor is based in Singapore, asked to see his father’s deed, Menewah said. “We don’t have a deed,” Williams told them, “but this is our land. Where would we get a deed from?” (In fact, very few rural Liberians have physical documentation related to the land their families have inhabited for generations.) “They said the land was for the government,” Williams told me later, “not for us.”

The company proceeded to plow under the family’s cassava, yams, and plantains, in addition to the 500 baby rubber trees that Menewah had recently planted with intentions of selling the latex. They disassembled Williams’s home and put the mud bricks on a tractor so he could rebuild elsewhere.

“The bush is our supermarket,” Menewah said, explaining how he used to hunt for small animals as well as gather fruit. “We get everything here. But now they’ve taken it all.” The company gave him a single payment of $340.

Williams was particularly broken up about the two breadfruit trees that his great-uncle had brought back from Ghana in 1922 and which, along with bush meat and “palm cabbage” (finely chopped, tender young palm leaves), had kept the family alive during the long years of fighting. “We lost our auntie, our uncle, our nephew, our niece,” Menewah said, spreading his arms to show me the horizontal scars from where the combatants had tied him up.

The coconut tree had apparently been left, along with the nearby papaya, as a courtesy when the company bulldozed everything else around the graves of Williams’s father and uncle. GVL encircled these with a rickety wooden fence. Whenever he or his father tries to tidy up the way they used to, Menewah said, “the company says we are damaging their property.”

These companies share something else in common. All are part of an organization called the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) that could require its member companies to stop buying palm oil linked to rainforest destruction— completely transforming the palm oil industry.

15M Take The Streets

London police had to retract a call to 'Report all Anarchist Sympathisers' when they realised it's a political philosophy, after many complaints. ClicOnPic for @ Posts

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clic pic for link Diane Wilson's account of how she, a fourth-generation shrimper, former boat captain, and mother of five, took a turn at midlife, unable to stand by quietly as she witnessed abuses of people and the environment. Since then, she has launched legislative campaigns, demonstrations, and hunger strikes.and been imprisoned dozens of times

The democratic confederalism of Rojava is an attempt to transcend borders and build a participatory alternative to the tyrannical states of the region. By Jeff Miley and Johanna Riha. Photo by Erin Trieb. Since the descent into civil war in Syria, revolutionary forces have seized control of the Kurdish region of Rojava. The mainstream media [...]

An interview with Debbie Bookchin on her father’s contributions to revolutionary theory and the adoption of his ideas by the Kurdish liberation movement. Editor’s note: Below you will find an interview with Debbie Bookchin, daughter of the late Murray Bookchin, who passed away in 2006. Bookchin spent his life in revolutionary leftist circles, joining a [... […]

Syriza’s “head-long retreat” in the standoff with its creditors hails the failure of Tsipras’ pro-euro strategy. It’s time to start preparing for Grexit. Photo by Angelos Tzortzinis. When the Eurogroup accepted Greece’s reform proposals on Tuesday, investors and EU leaders let out a collective sigh of relief: it appears that the bombshell of a disorderly [.. […]

UK Street Rebellion Aug 2011. ClicOnPic for more riotous posts.

Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi

f no other source is specified, the translated and original contents of this website are licensed under a Peer Production, P2P Attribution-ConditionalNonCommercial-ShareAlikeLicense. ( click image)

Anti Racist Action
freedom. ARA intends to do the hard work necessary to build a broad, strong movement against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, discrimination against the disabled, the oldest, the youngest, and the most oppressed peopl

The Anarcho-Punk Pages – Powered By Pure Anarcho-Punk!
Welcome to the Anarcho-Punk Pages, a global resource written by anarcho-punks for anarcho-punks. Click on the ‘Help’ tab to find out how to use and contribute to the directory, or just take a look around. Make Tea, Not War! The APP Collective

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Noam Chomsky website
chomsky.info was originally created by Pablo Stafforini, with the purpose of celebrating Chomsky’s work and encouraging activism worldwide. In December 2003, it became Noam Chomsky’s official website.

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Rising Tide North America was born out of the conviction that corporate-friendly and state-sponsored “solutions” to climate change will not save us. We’re a 100% volunteer, grassroots network of groups and individuals who take direct action to confront th

Take The Square
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